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Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine Robert Pagès' 1948 conception of "auto-document" as a possible forerunner to the neo-documentalist conception of "documentality" as offered in Bernd Frohmann's 2012 article "The Documentality of Mme Briet's Antelope." Design/methodology/approach: This paper is conceptual and historical. Findings: Robert Pagès' concept of the "auto-document" in his 1948 article proposed an understanding of documents that depends on the "uniqueness" of a document. His article proposed a post-Otletian theory of documents similar to a discussion of documents by Bernd Frohmann in 2012 with the concept of "documentality." Further attention to Pagès work and to Frohmann's works could result in new understandings of Briet's works, could illuminate other works and authors understood as belonging to neo-documentation and could yield new understandings of documents and information from the perspective of documentality as a new philosophy of information and documents. Research limitations/implications: Further attention to Pagès' work and to Frohmann's works could yield new understandings of documents and the relation of documentary types across natural and sociocultural domains and bring renewed attention to documentality as a new philosophy of information and documents. Practical implications: Attention to these issues could broaden the study of documents and documentation, increase the historical understanding of Suzanne Briet's works and bring light to other works in neo-documentation, particularly in regard to the concept of documentality as a new philosophy of documentation and information. Social implications: Attention to these issues could broaden the study of documents and documentation to include more broadly animal and other natural entities and our relationships to them. The works cited also illuminate an empirical science understanding of documents, documentary evidence and information. Originality/value: This is one of the first papers commenting on Robert Pagès' works and brings renewed attention to Bernd Frohmann's works, as well as to neo-documentation and its concept and philosophy of documentality, as a new philosophy of information and documents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This text is a guest editorial that reflects on the influence and mentorship of Michael Buckland, a prominent figure in the field of library and information science. The author shares their personal experience of discovering Buckland's work and how it shaped their own research and career. They highlight Buckland's humility, curiosity, and willingness to take chances on others. The text also includes a brief mention of Buckland's concept of "information as thing" and its impact on the author's understanding of museum objects as documents. Overall, the text serves as a tribute to Buckland's mentorship and the lasting impact he has had on the field. [Extracted from the article]

Purpose: Michael Buckland's works have spanned theoretical, historical and practice-oriented foci and genre. This article focuses on some of his theoretical-historical works that span over 20 years, which demonstrate a reading and critique of European Documentation in terms of what has been called "Documentality." This turn to a philosophy of information called "Documentality" marks the moment of "neo-documentation." This article surveys this moment in Buckland's works by reading his articles "Information as Thing," "What is a 'Document'?", and "Documentality Beyond Documents." It shows the transition from Documentation as a philosophy of information as representation to Documentality as a philosophy of information as function and performance. Some concepts and works of Bruno Latour are used to illuminate this transition from Documentation to Documentality. Implications and further research directions are discussed at the end. Design/methodology/approach: Conceptual and historical analyses. Findings: The article follows a neo-documentalist transition in Buckland's works in the thinking of documents from an Otletian representationalist epistemology ("Documentation") to a functionalist and performative epistemology ("Documentality") for documents. Research limitations/implications: This is a conceptual work on a limited corpus in Buckland's oeuvre. It has a limited discussion of Documentality in the works of other writers, namely the works of Bernd Frohmann and Maurizio Ferraris. Practical implications: The article points to historical shifts in the study of documents in Library and Information Science. Social implications: Documentality critically and materially studies documents in sociotechnical information management systems and elsewhere. Originality/value: This work highlights the importance of the above works and the importance of the neo-documentalist perspective of Documentality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: In this article the author would like to discuss information and the causal-temporal models as discussed in trauma theory and reports from trauma therapy. The article discusses two modes of temporality and the role of narrative explanations in informing the subject as to their past and present. Design/methodology/approach: Conceptual analysis. Findings: Information in trauma has different meanings, partly as a result of different senses of temporality that make up explanations of trauma in trauma theory. One important meaning is that of explanation itself as a cause or a therapeutic cure for trauma. Research limitations/implications: The research proposes that trauma and trauma theory need to be understood in terms of the role of explanation, with explanation being understood as persuasion. This follows the historical genealogy of trauma theory from its origins in hypnosis and psychoanalysis. Originality/value: The article examines the possibility of unconscious information and its effects in forming psychological subjectivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, affects are discussed as forces or intensive powers causing movements in individuals and groups and their subsequent social, cultural, and material (together and in sum, political) expressions. 1 The article suggests that the movements we should try to produce or support through libraries and other documentary institutions are movements of change toward longer-lasting and more sustainable affects that support life. It is desirable to adopt a production and reproduction model in libraries and documentation centers based on supporting institutional and individual agents that can modulate affects and redirect and create new trajectories toward responding to dire planetary and human needs that are now denied and repressed. This suggests that such institutions may wish to further critically examine how they reflect and how they direct and modulate epistemic and social forces, which forces they act upon and support, and which agents and powers they empower and to what degree they do so, toward long-term generative production and reproduction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contrasts Paul Otlet's epistemology of documents with that of Georges Bataille's in the late 1920s and early 1930s in regard to the body parts that they assign as sites and analogues for documents. A double meaning to the notion of documents emerges, defensive and offensive of and to twentieth-century European scientific epistemology, morality, and aesthetics: documents as the full and truthful representation of reality, and documents as the material inscription of social, cultural, and physical affordances leading to the reality of irrational drives. The brain as the site of the mind is said to be the physical location given to the former, and "the body" is the physical site given to the latter, reinforcing a traditional Western anatomical psychology determined by ideational and materialist ontologies and corresponding traditional bodily tropes for "reason" and "the senses." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the problem of value in unpaid labor from the perspective of the domestic labor struggles in the Wages for Housework campaign of the early 1970s in Italy. Some of the history of this movement is recounted in regard to the question of value in capital and, importantly, beyond capital. The issues of value that are raised in this perspective by posing questions of value in domestic labor against those in digital labor are not only the analogical and even the metonymical relations of domestic sphere production to digital labor and the critical discourse on it, but the historical and the foundational quality of the former to the latter, as well. In these models the larger social and cultural traditions within which labor is literally begotten remain, and so does capital's use of them. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Advocacy is a type of political expression. It takes certain political forms, depending on the state of the State, as a function of class relations. In "normal times," most States maintain a level of cultural hegemony that allows them control upon the tensions of class relations through what Althusser (2001) termed the "ideological state apparatus," with a lesser use of the "repressive state apparatus." In more acute times of States of exception and States of emergency, when the sovereign State increasingly reappears and claims itself as the nation, the range and scope of ideological expression tightens, and so too the repressive state apparatus becomes more active, foreclosing freedom of expression across various life-spheres by means of media control, violence, and other threats and actions of repressive force. "Advocacy" is increasingly pushed into a terrorist position as understood within a narrowing rational framework that then allows the increasingly sovereign State to punish it legally and morally. At the same time, "advocacy" assumes more ethical, rather than simply moral, dimensions, and its struggles for justice, and not just State sponsored rights, may become more universal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the relation between the concepts of the Epicurean void and the aleatory encounter in Louis Althusser’s late philosophy and the concepts of kairòs and the common name (or common concept; nome comune) in Antonio Negri’s later work. It is important to consider the political efficacy of nome comune in the context of ontological commitments such as the Althusserian void and Negri’s “postmodern” landscape of “total subsumption,” among other reasons because common concepts play important social and political mediating roles in both modern broadcast media and in more recent ranked information retrieval, crowd-sourced information aggregation, and computer mediated communication. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article explains why the concept of the user in Library and Information Science (LIS) user studies and information seeking behavior is theoretically inadequate and it proposes a reconceptualization of subjects, objects, and their relations according to a model of 'double mediation.' Formal causation (affordances) is suggested as a substitute for mechanistic causation. The notion of 'affective causation' is introduced. The works of several psychoanalysts and continental and Anglo-American philosophers are used as tools to develop the model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of the “work” in art differs from and challenges traditional concepts of the “work” in bibliography. Whereas the traditional bibliographic concept of the work takes an ideational approach that incorporates mentalist epistemologies, container-content metaphors, and the conduit metaphor of information transfer and re-presentation, the concept of the work of art as is presented here begins with the site-specific and time-valued nature of the object as a product of human labor and as an event that is emergent through cultural forms and from social situations. The account of the work, here, is thus materialist and expressionist rather than ideational. This article takes the discussion of the work in the philosopher Martin Heidegger's philosophical-historical account and joins this with the concept of the work in the modern avant-garde, toward bringing into critique the traditional bibliographic conception of the work and toward illuminating a materialist perspective that may be useful in understanding cultural work-objects, as well as texts proper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses Rob Kling's notion of the critical and how this term is embodied in Kling's social informatics and in works of other authors, which we identify as belonging to critical informatics. Issues of method and the notion of the empirical are discussed. The importance of such analyses in regard to social life and professional education is discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the folk-psychology model of representation and the need to replace this with a more expressionist model. It also examines writer Michael Polanyi's concept of tacit knowledge in relation to the role of analogical thought in expertise. The folk-psychology notion of individuals as repositories for knowledge, information and for other forms of mental content or their states, and as agents for sharing these contents along lines of simple representational expression and the conduit model of communication, is quite problematic and has been heavily criticized by writers in information science. Implicit knowledge in knowledge management, however, is also often written about in terms of Polanyi's notion of tacit knowledge. Although Polanyi uses the term tacit knowledge, his more common usage is tacit knowing. Tacit knowing is the process of creating general understandings from particular entities. Knowledge management's attempt to discuss a knowledge economy as distinct from an information economy was confused by its uncritical appropriation of folk-psychology and its very incomplete and problematic appropriation of source texts such as Polanyi's, but the general instincts of early knowledge management proponents as to the importance of knowledge still deserve attention.

Concepts and technologies of information and communication are discussed in the context of political philosophy and ontology. The questions of what is the meaning and sense of "information" and "communication" in modern political philosophy and what are the roles of technologies of such are discussed in regard to two notions of power and community: constitutional and constituent. The responsibility of designing and using information and communication technologies in response to an ontologically primary "social net" is discussed. One, ethical-political, role of the relation of philosophy to information is discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Explores the concept of social capital in knowledge management. Distinction between human capital and social capital; History of social capital; Value of social capital.

Discusses the historical and theoretical account of knowledge management in the 20th century through European documentation, critical modernity and post-Fordism in regard to the issue of language and community. Discussion of 'knowledge management' as a social, cultural, political and organizational phenomena; Elements of tacit knowledge.

Examines information technology theory from the aspect of its `conduit metaphor.' Historical approach and reading of certain texts of Warren Weaver and Norbert Wiener showing how the metaphor can construct notions of language; Impact on social space and the range and possibilities of information studies.

Examines how professional discourses, which are foundational for library and information science theory and practice, establish themselves in culture and project history. Ethical and political choices which arise out of the rhetoric and practice of professional discourse; Alignment of professional discourses with dominant ideological and social forces by means of language.

This article critically engages the theme of the game as a model for identity, community, and the meaning and function of objects in a recent work by Pierre Levy. Two of Levy's books have recently appeared in English translation, making this a timely moment to return to this theme that resonates throughout cultural modernity, especially in the areas of business, the military, sports, and, of course today, in digital software and network design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the life and works of librarian Suzanne Briet in Europe. Briet was an important figure in European documentation. In practical terms, she has resembled the special libraries movement in the U.S. and anticipated information science in intellectual terms. Briet was a professional librarian who created the reference room at the French National Library. Her understanding of documentation or information is based on sociological and cultural understandings of user needs. In addition, her notion of the user is institutional and other cultural needs for the performance of tasks and the answering of questions.

A letter to the editor is presented in response to the article "European Modernism and the Information Society: Informing the Present, Understanding the Past" in the previous issue is presented.